This morning's SMH carries a special investigation into alleged large-scale multi-million dollar fraud and mismanagement in various NSW Aboriginal land councils. The scams mostly seem to involve deals and kickbacks with dodgy developers over valuable coastal development sites...
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Now this is how you forensically carve up wankers like Phillip Adams .
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Richard Ackland's column in this morning's SMH provides a succinct summary of the state of play in the Jackson commission of enquiry into James Hardie Industries' manoeuvrings to effectively avoid legal liability for the mountain of asbestos exposure-related claims, to which i...
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Thirty years ago, when I managed the local credit union I received regular requests ( if memory serves it was called a S263 query) from the Australian Taxation Office to search through financial records in an attempt to find those taxpayers who had not declared significant int...
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I can't resist covering this story from the NT News : Territorians don't mind an orgy and are not embarrassed to use sex toys, survey of sexual habits shows. Sixty four per cent of Territory women and 48 per cent of men admitted to having been in a threesome. Fifty per cent of...
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Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. Apparently the ABC has finally been cowed and beaten by the Right Wing Death Beasts. And I have to confess I've been a (small) part of the problem by occasionally joining the chorus of criticism of Auntie's evident left-wing bias. Of course, if the...
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(via Al Bundy) Currency Lad , a frequent, well read and provocative poster at this and other blogs, has launched out in his own right and started a solo blog. And not before time. He's a welcome addition to the blogosphere, and can be expected to vex the left of the 'sphere on...
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Some readers may have momentarily felt sorry for Prince Charles after reading this story : PRINCE Charles handed over his entire personal fortune to his late ex-wife, Princess Diana, as part of their divorce settlement, his former financial adviser told a British newspaper. Ge...
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Al Bundy has posted an amusing and lengthy shot in the History Wars at his blog. The latest skirmish started with Al posting in my comment box (to this post ) a link to an account in the Oz of events at a meeting of the Australian Historical Association, which discussed variou...
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Here I was, just cruising the blogs when I came upon Al Bundy's latest and, while thinking "he can write a good piece" especially the link to this post by Patrick when who should walk through the door but my beloved with her purse bulging with the well gotten gains of a public...
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As regular readers would know, a young couple that come from the next suburb are currently travelling the world. Every now and then they send me a travelogue which I post to my web site. The latest can be read here . For those who might like to see a wider view of Africa Tarun...
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I can't tell you how disappointed I am that our political leaders have been so badly let down by the intelligence community, not only in the US and UK but in Australia as well . The really tragic thing is that John Howard would clearly have done something completely different...
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Sam "Yobbo" Ward doesn't think much of Qantas. But he probably should thank his lucky stars that Aeroflot isn't our national airline: Two crew members on a domestic Aeroflot flight beat up a passenger who had complained that the flight attendants were drunk, airline spokeswoma...
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I have a confession to make. I've started watching ABC TV Media Watch again, after swearing blind a year or so ago that I'd boycott it because of David Marr's blatant, hypocritical bias. He's no less biased or hypocritical now, but Marr is an amusing, eccentric character in hi...
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Troppo Armadillo is clearly in tune with the zeitgeist. I posted a long article about values and civility several weeks ago. Now I see Don Arthur has also posted a shorter piece on the subject, musing that "deep civility" might be regarded as a core value of classical liberali...
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The second of theTerritory issues I thought worth mentioning (see post immediately below for the first one) is a minor controversy about whether the NT (presumably somewhere in central Australia) will be the site for a Commonwealth low-medium level nuclear waste dump, in the w...
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A couple of current political controversies in the NT might be of some interest to a wider audience. The first is John Howard's announcement yesterday that park entry fees into Kakadu will be scrapped completely from 1 January 2005. At the moment they're $16.25 per head, as Je...
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Christopher Sheil blogs a fascinating viewpoint that seeks to characterise current Australian political progressions in a sweeping ideological overview sense: This era [ neoliberalism of the 1980s ] has in turn given way to an aggressive neoconservative reaction. The reaction...
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This story claims that the Nine Network is about to make drastic personnel changes, especially to its current affairs lineup: Ray Martin and Jana Wendt are among those stars whose positions are under threat, with gardening guru Don Burke also set to be replaced by Jamie Durie....
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What's all this hoo-haa about the Iraqi PM dropping a few insurgents ? They said the 58-year-old prime minister "wanted to send a message to his policemen and soldiers not to be scared if they kill anyone especially, they are not to worry about tribal revenge". What better way...
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I'll leave o thers to report on the match but wanted to say that the game and the result, while not unexpected, could have been made more interesting had the Australian coach been more constructive. I say not unexpected because the world's best attacking team vs the best defen...
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It's granny season in the Top End. Visit any shopping centre and you'll see the oldies shuffling around wasting time, looking after the grandchildren, until their working children finish supporting the unemployed and the military and they can go home to get their fix of the da...
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I've just deleted the "Indiscreet Personal Revelation" post from the database. It was making me feel bad every time I saw it. And it was having an even worse effect on Jen. Not much point in being made unhappy by your own blog. Probably wasn't a good idea to turn my life into...
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One of the oddest stories to emerge from the 15th International AIDS Conference in Bangkok is that James Glassman of the American Enterprise Institute found - to his considerable shock - that the American delegation booth didn't have a photo of George W. Bush displayed. It see...
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I've decided to take on board Terry Sedgwick's wise words and follow the advice of Kingsley Amis: "If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing." ALP barrackers Tim Dunlop and Christopher Sheil have both gone into bravura foot-stamping mode in the wake of the p...
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My attention was taken by this piece from The Weekend Australian (not available online as far as I can see): The world may be about to watch one of its last Olympic Games without genetically enhanced athletes. With the first genetic treatments to regenerate muscle, enhance its...
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Don Arthur's recent blogging comeback has stimulated a flowering of creativity, at least on the left of the blogosphere. As Tim Dunlop's Blogjam roundup seems to be on holiday while Margo promotes her new anti-Howard book (which I haven't been tempted to buy or read), I though...
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I always feel unaccountably nervous when I find myself agreeing (as I often do) with Paul Watson . Maybe I'm subconsciously fearful of becoming infected by the conviction that all the woes of the world are caused by my parents' generation, and that it's too late to get any sat...
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Kept out of bed by rampant insomnia, I've finally finished my long-delayed project of adding description tags to all the blogroll links in the right column. I was more or less shamed into it by John Quiggin's generous mention of TA on last night's Sandy McCutcheon Australia Ta...
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My recent post , about the resumed History Wars and the status of the doctrine of terra nullius , continues to attract comment box debate. Two of the more interesting comments ( here and here ) have been from historian Brian Spittles. The bottom line is that Brian has undertak...
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(Via John Quiggin) Oh for joy! Don Arthur has finally made a comeback to blogging, presumably having finally finished his doctoral thesis. I wonder if ruminating on Don's admirable self-discipline might help this armadillo to do likewise and get back to the PhD slog after the...
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Back from a few days in Kakadu. I see that my sincere flattery of Geoff and Wendy failed to flush either of them out of the blogging woodwork. Maybe it might do the trick if more of you mob were to say really really nice things about them in the comment box. I had intended to...
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Jen and I are going away for a few days into the tourist-infested wilds of Kakadu. Not all that wild, actually; we're staying in four star comfort at the Gagudju Crocodile Hotel at Jabiru. It seems that our roughing it in a swag days are over. We'll be back Thursday night, but...
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Tarun and Dan have emailed more details of their African Odyssey: read it here.
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Future developments in this story from ABC Online will bear watching. I've heard such stories from several separate sources over the years, so I can't say I'm utterly astounded. Nevertheless, it's quite a weird feeling, watching a story of this sort unfold about someone you've...
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This post at The Spin Starts Here would be a worthy recipient of a Blog Bile Award next time it's up for adjudication. It's also a fairly convincing demonstration of the decline of civility (a phenomenon never evident here at Troppo , where the worst social sin we ever commit...
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